Tengu (2 page)

It was harder
than anyone knew, being the most promising young video star of 1983.

With four
minutes left, she poured herself a cup of coffee. She sipped it and repeated
her lines under her breath: “Is that really what you think of me?
After all those days and nights together?
After all those
things you said?”

There were
three minutes left. One hundred eighty seconds of life. She crossed the living
room with her coffee mug in one hand and her script in the other. The sun was
shining through the loose-woven yellow drapes drawn across the French doors,
and the whole room was suffused in daffodil-coldred light. Her bare toes curled
into the Tengu white shag rug.

“Is that really
what you think of me?” she repeated.

Two minutes.
She switched on the Sony television which stood in the corner. On top of the
television was a sprig of poinsettia in a glass carafe of water. She had picked
it yesterday evening, before she went out with Dan. On the wall behind the
television was an original studio sketch for the Jones family parlor, signed by
the artist. In a concentrated whisper, Sherry said:

“After all those days and nights together?
After all those
things you said?”

A commercial
for Santa Anita Dodge appeared on the television screen–a fast-talking man in a
powder-blue suit and a Buddy Holly hairstyle. “When you bring the family down
to Santa Anita Dodge, we’ll give each of your children a free balloon, and your
wife will be able to pick up a free voucher for hairstyling and a beauty
treatment. , That’s guaranteed, whether you buy a new Dodge or not.”

“Is that really
what you think of me?”

One minute
left. Thirty seconds.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Five.

Sherry turned
away from the television to set her mug down on the glass-and-bamboo coffee
table in the middle of the living room.

Her telephone
rang, although nobody | ever found out who it was, calling her at 7:49:55 in
the morning.

The noise was
so shattering that she thought a bomb had gone off. Then she thought it must be
an earthquake. But as she turned back toward the French windows, she saw both
huge panes of glass bursting inward, so that the whole living room was filled
with a blizzard of glittering, tumbling fragments. Next, the metal screens were
ripped away, and the aluminum upright between the broken windows was smashed
aside as if it were cardboard.

She didn’t
scream. She didn’t even understand what was happening until it was too late.
She raised her hands to protect her face from the flying glass, but the glass
was nothing.

Through the
wrecked windowframe stepped a short, powerfully built man dressed in a
strangely tied-up yellow robe. His skull was cropped down to a bristly black
brush. His face was covered by a grotesque white mask, expressionless and evil.

Sherry tried to
back away, tried to cover her nakedness, but a sharp triangle of glass sliced
into the side of her foot, and her hesitation was fatal.

The man seized
her left wrist in a grip so hard that it broke both her radius and her ulna. He
twisted her fiercely around, and gripped her throat from behind. She gagged and
choked, and tried to thrash against him with her legs, but he was impossibly
strong.

Without a word,
without even a grunt, he went down on one knee and pulled Sherry backward
across his thigh. She felt a splitting pain in her spine that was so intense
that she passed out. But she instantly regained consciousness and was drowned
in scarlet waves of agony. The man was hurting her so much she couldn’t even
believe it was happening to her.

Her back broke.
She felt it snap. She could see the combed-plaster ceiling of her bungalow, and
the paper lantern with the flower patterns on it. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t
cry out,
couldn’t
move. It couldn’t be real. Things
like this didn’t happen. She wasn’t here at all. She must be someplace else.
Asleep.
Dreaming.

She could still
hear the radio somewhere outside. It was playing “Samba Pa Ti.”

Silently, the
powerful man gripped the inside of her thighs. Her head was lying back on the
rug now, and her hands were clenched in paralysis over her breasts. Her entire
nervous system was dislocated, and she was already dying. The man let out a
deep, suppressed hmphas he pulled her thighs further and further apart,
stretching every muscle and sinew. Through a haze of pain and disbelief, Sherry
heard something crack in her groin, although she could no longer feel anything
below her waist.

The man let her
tumble from his upraised knee onto the rug. He stood up, keeping a hold on the
ankle and the thigh of her right leg. With deliberate care, he planted his
black silk slipper on Sherry’s pubic bone, to give him balance and leverage,
and then he twisted her leg around as if he were trying to tear the leg off a
chicken.

She was lucky
she couldn’t feel it. The ball of her thighbone was wrenched out of its socket.
Then the skin and flesh were screwed around so tightly that they tore apart, in
a grisly welter of burst arteries. The man gave Sherry’s leg one more turn, and
ripped it right away from her body.

He stepped
back, and looked down at her. Her breathing was shallow with shock, and her
face was already blue. Her eyes were clouded over. The man wiped his hands,
first on his robes, then on the drapes. He didn’t seem to know what to do next.

Sherry realized
she was dying. She didn’t know why. She could see the man looking down at her,
and she tried to think how she could ask him. It didn’t really matter, of
course. Nothing mattered when you were dead.

Her last
thought was that she wished she could see her home in Indiana just one more
time.

The man in the
yellow robe watched her die, his mask impassive. Then he walked back out the
broken French window, and stood in the morning sunlight, still and thoughtful,
as if he had just returned from a long and unexpected journey.

A
s Sherry was dying, Mrs. Eva Crowley was parking her slate-colored
Seville Elegante on a red line close to the twin towers of Century Park East.
She switched off the motor and sat in the driver’s seat for a while, watching
her pale blue eyes in the rearview mirror. Well, she thought, this is ‘it. This
is where my life is pasted back together again, or lost for good.

‘She climbed
out of the car and locked it. Normally she never bothered, but this morning she
felt the need for as many mundane rituals as possible–not only to keep herself
from trembling with fear, but to delay the moment when she was going to have to
stand face to face with Gerard and tell him: “Choose.”

Gerard hadn’t
come home now for three nights in succession, and Eva Crowley had had enough.
She had sworn j to
herself
in the small hours of the
morning, as she lay hugging her husband’s crumpled pillow, that she was going
to finish for good all the pain and humiliation of being a cheated wife. No
more evenings with only Dan Rather, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and her sleeping
twin daughters for company. No more false sympathy when Gerard called from the
office to say that work had snowed him under again, and I’m sorry, Evie, I just
have to keep at it all through the night.

Today, Gerard
Crowley, the self-made president of Crowley Tobacco Imports, was going to be
forced to make up his mind.

As Eva walked
across the plaza toward the entrance of Century Park East, her footsteps echoed
on the concrete paving, and she could see a distant and severe image of herself
in the glass doors, approaching with all the inevitability of her own fate.

She was a
petite, slender woman, with ash-blonde hair drawn back in a bun. Her face was
pale and perfectly oval, like a blanched almond. For the frightening and solemn
Tengu performance which this day demanded of her, she was wearing a dark gray
suit with a pencil skirt, and black stiletto shoes. She could have been going
to a board meeting, or a funeral.

Eva felt
breathless as she waited in the deserted lobby for the elevator to take her to
the twenty-seventh floor. She began to bite at her pearl-pink nails, and then
stopped herself. She hadn’t bitten her nails since she was an overweight young
student in New York, plain and agonizingly shy, and hopelessly infatuated with
an overbearing slob of a business administration senior called Hank Pretty. Her
life in those days had been haunted by slipping grades, headaches, and the
vision of spending the rest of her years with a man whose body stank of sweat
and whose mind had about as much charm and order as the morning after Mardi
Gras
.

Eva and Hank
had fought. Hank had hit her. She had spat red blood into the rose-colored
washbasin, and the whole world had seemed to be coming to a close.

She hadn’t
attempted suicide, though. Eva had never been the suicidal type. These days,
she put on weight when she was anxious, eating too many taco chips and
guacamole, and she smoked, too. But she had the painful strength to make
appointments with her fears and face up to them, as if her fears were imaginary
doctors with bad news about her smear, or phantom dentists with bicuspids to
pull.

She sometimes
wished she had no strength at all, and could readily sacrifice herself to
Gerard’s faithlessness without a struggle. But she couldn’t, and wouldn’t. She
was too much like her father.

Ornery.

The elevator
bell softly chimed the arrival of the twenty-seventh floor. The doors rumbled
open and Eva stepped out. On the wall in front of the elevator bank was a
brushed-aluminum sign with the inscription

CROWLEY TOBACCO
IMPORTS, INC. LOS ANGELES–CHICAGO–MIAMI.

She stood and
looked at it for a moment, because she remembered the day it had first been
screwed in-to place. Then she walked evenly along the corridor toward the
tinted glass doors of the office itself.

It was a few
seconds before eight o’clock. Gerard had always started work early. When they
had first married, nineteen years ago, she had hardly ever seen him in the
mornings. He had been out of bed and jogging along Lexington Road well before
six, and she had only woken up at seven o’clock when the door of his Riviera
slammed and the engine whistled into life. The kitchen would be left like the
mess deck of the Marie Celeste–half-eaten crispbread, spilled milk, letters
ripped open and left on the table–and there would never be any husband around
to prove who had done it.

In later years,
though, Eva had woken up earlier. Some mornings Gerard had opened his eyes, and
she had been lying there watching him. He had mistaken her steady gaze for
affection, even for adoration. In fact, she had been considering the empty and
ungraspable nature of their marriage, and wondering who he really was.

She loved him.
She had always known that. She wanted to stay married to him. But she had never
been able to decide whether he loved her in return or simply used her as a
hostess, and mother, and occasional bed partner. He always called her “Evie,”
and for three of their nineteen years she had protested about it. Then she had
given up.

She opened the
office door. There were decorative plants and white vinyl chairs, and a wide
teak desk. There was nobody around. Eva waited for a moment, and then crossed
the reception area to the door marked GERARD F. CROWLEY, PRESIDENT. She felt
peculiarly numb, and her hesitation in front of the door seemed to last for
whole minutes.

Here I am, she
thought. I’ve seen him so tired that he was weeping. I’ve seen him laugh. I’ve
seen him sick, and I’ve seen him happy. I’ve seen every detail of his naked
body.
The pattern of moles on his thigh.
The curl of his pubic hair.
I’ve borne him twins. And yet
I’m standing in front of his office door, almost too frightened to knock.

She knocked.

There was a
pause. Then his voice asked, “Who is that?”

In a dry, tight
falsetto, she said, “It’s me.”

“Evie?” he
queried.

She opened the
door. The office faced east, and it was suffused with the milky light of
morning.

Gerard, dark
and unshaven, and wearing a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up, was sitting
behind his wide white desk. On the corner of the desk, her eyes wide with
anticipation, was his receptionist Francesca, auburn-haired, tall, and dressed
in skin-tight white cotton jeans and an olive-green silk blouse.

There was a
silver cigar box on Gerard’s desk. It had been Eva’s tenth-anniversary present
to him. It was engraved: “With undying love,
your
Evie.” That was how much he had taken her character away from her.

Gerard said,
“You’re up early.”

He was a very
lean man, with thick black wiry hair that was just beginning to turn gray. His
face was long and angular, with a thin, sharp nose and sharply defined lips.
His eyes were deep-set and dark, and yet she had always felt they were oddly
lacking in expression. You couldn’t look at him for very long without having to
glance away in search of something more sympathetic.

Francesca stood
up. Eva was conscious of the receptionists’s breasts, shifting under the thin
silk of her blouse. Thirty-six C cup, she guessed, but definitely braless
today. There were cheap silver puzzle rings on the girl’s fingers, and Eva
could almost picture those fingers clutching Gerard’s stiffened penis. The same
way any prizewinner holds a trophy.

“I, er… Evie,
it’s good to see you,” said Gerard. He stood up, and came around his desk to
greet her. He was far taller than she was, nearly six two, but somehow he
seemed shorter today, diminished.

Francesca said
uneasily, “I think I’ll go make that coffee now.’’